1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information distribution system, and, more particularly, to an information distribution system that detects information needs of users from the usage histories of information devices such as a printer and a copying machine, collects information that meets the needs from information sources, and then distributes the collected information to the users.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an office environment, it is necessary to identify users who need information to be uploaded to the Internet or an internal document control server, for example, and to timely distribute the information to the identified users. In a conventional method, the information distribution is performed in the following manner:    1) each user inputs the category and keyword of information he/she needs to acquire, and adds the category and keyword to his/her own profile registered in the system; and    2) if new information is uploaded, the system searches for the corresponding profile, and distributes the new information to the user having the profile.
However, there are several problems with the conventional system that manually produces and corrects the profiles of users. The problems include:    1) the keyword input imposes additional workload on each user;    2) users might not be able to remember the appropriate keyword for their information needs; and    3) when the information needs to be changed, the change is not reflected in the system unless the user manually corrects his/her profile.
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2000-105764 discloses a system that produces each new user profile based on document information that has been determined to be suitable for producing a profile by the user, stores and controls the relationships among user profiles, and displays document information that constantly reflects changes of the interests of the users. Also, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2001-160067 discloses a Web recommended article notifying service system. In this system, the similarity between each user profile and an article is calculated, identified, and analyzed, by more than one method. In generating each profile, the history of the user reading documents is fed back to the profile. Japanese Laid-Open Patent No. 2001-350786 discloses a system and method (a marketing support system and method) of analyzing electronic documents produced by users, when generating profiles of the users. By doing so, incorrectness in the profiles can be avoided, and the workload of constructing profiles can be reduced.
Further, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 11-66081 discloses a profile acquiring system, an information providing system, a profile acquiring method, and a profile acquiring medium. In this disclosure, documents that have been produced, read, or quoted by each user, are utilized to acquire the profile of the user. Also, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 11-45284 discloses a profile producing method, and a computer-readable recording medium on which a program for performing the procedures of the method with a computer is recorded. In this disclosure, the search conditions set by users and the search results are utilized to produce the profiles of the users.
All of the above prior art disclosures are aimed at automatically generating profiles, though the information acquiring means on which the automatic profile generation is based are different among the prior art disclosures. Still, the conventional information acquiring means do not include office information devices, such as printers, copying machines, scanners, facsimile machines, and digital multifunction peripherals. As a person uses a printer to print out a document, or a copying machine to obtain a duplicate copy of the document, the operation history has relevance to the person and the information contained in the document. For instance, when a user prints out copies of reference material to be distributed at a business meeting, the information contained in the reference material is the information necessary to the user and his/her work. Also, when a user makes a duplicate copy of a monograph, the information contained in the document (the monograph) is the information that the user is interested in.